Spinach-Bacon Pie

I had all the ingredients in the freezer.

Spinach-Bacon Pie 1 unbaked 9-inch pie shell 6 strips bacon, cooked crisp, then crumbled or chopped* 1 (12-oz) package frozen chopped spinach, defrosted 3 eggs 2 tbsp flour 1 tsp salt 2 tsp onion powder (more if desired) 1 tsp black pepper ½ tsp cayenne pepper (if desired) 1 cup evaporated milk 1 cup (or 4 oz) shredded cheddar cheese (or any other type of cheese that melts well) Heat oven to 400°. Put the spinach in a strainer and press out as much juice as possible. Mix the juice with the evaporated milk. Then add enough water to make 2 cups. Heat it up on the stove or in the microwave. In a large bowl, whisk together eggs, flour, and seasonings. Pour in the milk while stirring constantly. Then mix in the bacon and spinach. Pour this into the pie shell. If needed, gently spread out the spinach if it landed in a sort of pile. Sprinkle the cheese onto the iron. Then bake 20-25 minutes, or until golden on top. *Naturally, you can just cut up 6 pieces of pre-cooked bacon if you have that on hand. Adapted from 9th Grand National Cookbook: 100 Prize-Winning Recipes from the Pillsbury's Best 9th Grand National Bakeoff, 1957--- via Mid-Century Menu. Recipe by Linda Lee Bauman (Whitehouse, Ohio), Junior Winner

I love the three bell pepper slices on top of the pie (which don't get mentioned in the recipe.) I imagine people fighting over who gets to eat the garnish because there isn't enough to go around.

When no one is around the house to bemoan the absence of meat, I often make vegetarian (or at least vegetarian-ish) food. Spinach-cheese-and-mushroom pasta is one of my default choices when I want to make dinner without thinking about it. This recipe (which is scanned from a Pillsbury Bakeoff handout) came across the Mid-Century Menu group, and I figured it was about the same meal with the ingredients rearranged a bit. Also, bacon is involved. 

When we made the gumdrop cookies, I mentioned that I had found a box of antique scissors and handed every pair to a friend who had made the mistake of saying he wanted to learn how to sharpen them. Well, I later found these cute things in a different box that probably hasn't been opened in years.

 

Getting back to the bacon, I am always a bit astonished at how much you lose when you cook it. By the time it was done, it was a shriveled husk of its former self. You'd never believe I had to cut it in half to fit it in the pan.

Moving to the other ingredients, we are supposed to drain and squeeze our spinach. (I also had a tiny bit of frozen bell peppers in a near-empty bag, so I added those too.) I think the recipe intends that we discard what we drained off, but hardly any spinach remained. 

Even if you don't fret about saving every last water-soluble vitamin, we had wrung out a lot of flavor. I didn't want to make an entire pie out of a blank-tasting wad of fiber, so I used the spinach juice to dilute the canned milk. The resulting gray-green stuff, which is full of delicious water-soluble vitamins, is theoretically the beginning of dinner. 

Incidentally, this is the first time I've used evaporated milk in something besides fudge.

Setting aside our filling ingredients, this pie came with its own crust recipe. It barely made enough dough to cover the pan. If you make it without increasing the amounts a bit, you will probably end up carefully patching every last scrap onto various holes and gaps before you're done. (It's a pretty basic pie crust recipe, so you won't lose anything special if you just get a frozen pie shell.)

Now, the first time I made this pie (yes, we liked it enough to make it again), water seeped out when I cut it. And I don't like weeping pies. So the next time, I added just a smidge of flour to the pie filling. After whisking the lumps away, we were ready to put all of this together.

Even if you just buy a frozen pie crust and pre-cooked bacon, you will spend a fair amount of time prepping your ingredients for this recipe, only to dump it all into one bowl at the end. 

All the ingredients landed in one big mound in the center of the pie crust. I had to do some spoon-nudging to even everything out.

 

This isn't at all pretty, but we hadn't yet crowned the pie with cheese. I was pleasantly surprised that the recipe calls for actual cheddar instead of American cheese. Maybe using real cheese set Linda Lee Bauman apart from all the other contenders and won her the prize.

This pie was absolutely fantastic. I can see why it won a bakeoff prize. It's rich without being overwhelming, and a good serving of vegetables without being punitive. Also, the spices seeped into the pie crust and turned it into a pretty good half-approximation of herbed breadsticks. And as an added bonus, the leftover pie slices were unexpectedly sturdy. I could just stack them in the storage container and none of them fell apart. 

 

Gingerbread Waffles: Exactly what I hoped for

'Tis the season to not turn the oven on!

Gingerbread Waffles 2 cups flour 1½ tsp baking powder ½ cup baking soda ¼ tsp salt 2 tsp. cinnamon 1 tsp. ginger ½ cup shortening 1 cup molasses (12 ounces if you're using a kitchen scale) 2 eggs, separated ½ cup buttermilk or sour cream Place the flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and spices into a sifter. Set aside. Thoroughly beat the shortening and molasses until thoroughly blended. Then beat in the egg yolks. Sift in the dry ingredients, a little at a time, adding them alternately with the buttermilk. Mix well. Beat the egg whites stiff, then fold them in. Cook on a hot, well-greased waffle iron. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

I saw this recipe when I was flipping through Mrs. Mary Martensen's cookbook, which I've come to like a lot. You might not think a recipe book from the depths of the Great Depression would have many good options, but most of the recipes look really good. This one in particular has a lot of molasses, it involves a waffle iron, and (as a result of the latter point) means I don't need to turn on the oven in this miserable heat. It's like Mrs. Mary Martensen had a reverse-seance and wrote a recipe just for me.

Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933

We are first directed to beat together the molasses and the shortening. This is when I noticed that today's gingerbread uses only molasses. There isn't any extra sugar added. I never knew I could feel so deeply glad I didn't halve a recipe. If the waffles were bad, the batter at least would be amazing.

 

The molasses and the shortening were a semi-curdled mess, but the egg yolks helped everything coalesce into what looked like a really good blondie batter. 

The recipe calls for sour milk, which was a lot easier in the pre-pasteurization days. From what I understand, raw milk contains the right bacteria to go sour instead of just expiring. Of course, raw milk also has the right bacteria to make you very sick. And even if today's waffles are getting cooked which eliminates the risk of disease, I'm not keeping bottles of germs in the refrigerator. So even though raw milk is easier to get today than it has ever been in this millennium (and has somehow become a political cause for those people with angry eagle car decals), I used sour cream instead.

Tastes like food safety and tacos!

Our batter was soon ready except for the whipped egg whites. And yes, it tasted amazing.

I didn't know if the egg whites would fluff this up or deflate on contact. But afterward, our batter did seem a bit looser.

Our first waffles stuck to the iron even though I made sure to brush it with lots of shortening. I managed to get scratch all the residue out with a wooden skewer, leaving me with a lot of hard batter shavings. This was the best I managed to save.

I gave my iron grease some thought. Before pizzelles taught me otherwise, I always and only used cooking spray. After learning better, I swore my loyalty to melted shortening and a brush. But maybe I had been wrong to completely forsake the spray can. I spritzed the iron and the next waffles fell out of the iron perfectly.

So, we have learned that there is moderation and nuance in all pan fats. But what do we think of the recipe itself?

I am so glad I made these. They taste exactly like what I hoped for. They were light and fluffy rather than dense. You can't really make a gingerbread house out of these (or at least, not a very big one), so you'll have to eat them instead. In short, they were exactly what I thought I'd get at the top of the recipe. If you like molasses and spices, you owe it to yourself.

Electric Pizzelles: or, Dabbling in modernity

I hate when someone happens to check the porch before I do. I can't lie about where my splurges came from.

 

I liked the idea of electrical pizzelles even after our first attempt was a bust. For one thing, standing over a hot stove with a waffle iron isn't as fun in hot weather. I also like cooking with friends, and not all of them have suitable stoves. And all my Italian friends and their mothers keep giving me weird looks for doing this on the stovetop.

This particular model (and its sales price) seemed perfect. As shallow as this sounds, I liked that it was not made in Ohio.* And it looked so darn cute. If you're going to end up staring at a waffle iron lid while waiting for things to cook, it may as well look nice on top. And I loved the designs inside this one. They remind me of handmade doilies.

 

This one also looked better suited for pizzelles than the first one we bought. It has very sturdy hinges. (I checked the pictures before I made that final buying click.) Therefore, in theory we can squeeze it tightly shut and get pizzelles that are as thin and crisp as our stovetop ones.

And look at the handles! Our pizzelle iron/sandwich press has thin sheet-metal handles, but this thing has big chunky rods. So I don't think this one will bend or flex like our first one did.

I found the instructions online. In addition to telling us how to use it, they put a handy pronunciation guide right on the front cover:

Naturally, I had to use this the very night it arrived. Who has the patience to let their new toys sit untouched? I soon found that due to a particularly bad combination of short power cords and inconvenient socket placement, this would only work if I perched it over a stove burner. 

After getting the iron steady on its feet and within range of a socket, it was time to choose its first recipe. The first thing you make on any new kitchen implement sets the tone for its future life on your countertop. I made Fante's recipe because it's hard to go wrong with Philadelphia. Besides, we used beef fat instead of shortening in the batter, which was a perfect match for is iron's beefy hinges.

I'm always surprised at how quickly you can mix pizzelles. Maybe it's because any recipe that involves clearing most of the countertops feels like an event. But sooner than I thought, we were putting our first-ever splots of electrified dough onto the iron. It was both momentous and anticlimactic.

The instructions made it look like these would cook almost instantly, which I figured was just marketing hype. But sooner than I thought, the smells coming off of the iron had lightly-toasted overtones. I opened our new electric treasure to find that my pizzelles were clinging to the lid. I managed to get them off of the iron with almost nothing staying behind. But since hot pizzelles are as sturdy as wet toilet paper, they looked like this.

Not bad, but I'm not thrilled either.

Our next pair of pizzelles was... well, they're not the best. But they did come off of the iron intact. And as a bonus, they pulled out the crumbs that the first ones left in the grooves and notches. 

Things got better with each attempt. Before I could realize how fast we were cooking, we had used up all of the dough. Six pizzelles may seem like a paltry amount, but I cut the recipe down to one-sixth the original amount. Then, two of them went directly into the trash because they stuck to the iron and then tore apart. Lastly, because I haven't worked out the right amount of batter per pizzelle, I kept putting too much on the iron. So, more than a few would-have-been pizzelles oozed out and got scraped into the trash.

First-time foibles aside, I liked making these. But I wasn't impressed with the results. They just weren't as nice as the stovetop ones. But as I told myself, this is my first time making pizzelles the modern electric way. And my first stovetop pizzelles were not very good either. So with that in mind, I will not say that electrical pizzelles are inferior. I'm just not very good at making them yet.

Of course, you can only get better at electric pizzelles if you make them again. But when I plugged the iron for more fun, it stayed cold. At first I thought I had accidentally plugged in something else (all those power cords look the same), but I checked and I didn't. So, I tested every problem I could think of, starting with the easiest to fix. 

First, I tried a different power cord. (This iron uses the same detachable power cord as most percolators.) When that didn't help, I undid those two big screws on the lid to see if anything looked visibly wrong in there. Everything under the top cover looked fine, even though I didn't really know what I was looking for. Next, I took off the bottom plate. 

Before looking in there, I had thought it might be the thermostat on this thing because there's nothing else in there to go wrong. Really, aside from the thermostat switch, this is basically an incandescent bulb if you're drawing up a wiring diagram. So as I unscrewed the bottom, I was worrying about whether I would have to figure out the cutoff temperature of a pizzelle thermostat, or whether I had bought an overpriced dust collector. But that part looked fine (or at least, I didn't see any big burn marks). 

I soon found the problem: One of the wires had disconnected itself from the heating element. The real surprise here is that this held up long enough to make a batch of pizzelles in the first place.

You don't need to be an expert to surmise that the bare wire should be connected to something.

My electrical experience is limited to occasionally buying one of those lamp rewiring kits from a hardware store, but I knew this would be a basic job for someone who knew what they were doing. And so, I went to the one shop that still does appliance repairs. I've been there so often that he just asked "What have you broken this time?" 

He didn't even bother taking it to the back of the shop. Instead, he propped it up, told me to hold it still, and resoldered it on the front counter. Naturally, we couldn't wait a single day before cooking with electricity again. 

Now, I've been watching a lot of videos of people using electric pizzelle irons since I don't have anyone to drop by and show me how. And I've noticed that people don't grease the iron before every single splot of dough. And so, I put our next pizzelles onto an absolutely dry iron. Even though this apparently works for everyone online, this happened.

I gave the iron one more chance before basting it with grease, and the pizzelles didn't tear apart. They also didn't let go.

This time, I could gently peel them off intact. For the first time, all those recipes that say "remove with a fork" made sense. A spatula was too blunt an instrument, but a dinner fork is perfect for carefully sliding and jimmying under the hot waffle.

Because practice makes perfect and it's always a good time for cookies, I made another batch very soon thereafter. This time, I decided to grease the iron for the first ones, but not thereafter. Also, I thought that perhaps this wouldn't be such a drippy, messy process if I lightly brushed on the shortening instead of slathering it on. And... well... we were almost successful.

After just a few batches, I'm beginning to understand why so many instruction manuals say to throw out the first pizzelles. The rest of them came out all right, but the first ones seem to love tearing apart. 

At first I hated the ragged-looking edges, which don't happen on stovetop pizzelles because any excess batter-drips burn off instead unless you're quick to scrape the iron with a knife. But while I was making these, a friend of mine happened to text me a picture saying "Mom made pizzelles last night!" And wouldn't you know it, his mother's pizzelles at had ragged edges too.

Even after just a few times, making our pizzelles electrically had proven easier than doing it on a stove. It felt like I was just zapping pizzelles into existence. I didn't even realize I had reached the end of the batter. 

I'm getting the knack of using this thing, but I think I like making them on the stove better. This isn't some weird sort of stovetop purism- I just think it's more fun. For one thing, it feels weird to me to carefully focus on a tiny waffle iron instead of a whole stovetop. And also, I can't get the pizzelles to stop having raggedy edges, and that irks me. It'd be nice if they had packaged it with a matching round cookie cutter so you could quickly trim them while the dough was still hot and soft.  

I'll use this at least a few more times before I decide if I like it, but it may go back into the world to find someone new.

*For those who missed it, I got into making pizzelles after a bad breakup with someone whose family is from Ohio, which has left me salty about the entire state.↪

Blueberry-Oatmeal Muffins: or, They're worth all the bowls

We needed something to bake right on the first attempt.

Blueberry-Oatmeal Muffins Heat oven to 350°. Line a cupcake pan with papers, or coat with cooking spray. Mix, and let soak 10 minutes: ½ cup buttermilk* or sour cream (if using sour cream, add about 1 or 2 tbsp more) ½ cup rolled oatmeal While the oatmeal is soaking, combine: ½ cup all-purpose flour ½ cup whole-wheat flour 1½ tsp baking powder ¼ tsp baking soda ¼ tsp nutmeg ¼ tsp salt Sift them together, or stir with a fork or a whisk to mix and fluff up. Next, thoroughly beat together in a large bowl: 1 egg ¾ cup brown sugar 1½ tsp vanilla 2 tbsp water Add the oatmeal mixture, and mix well. Then gently mix in the dry ingredients. Lastly, add: ½ cup blueberries, or more if desired (if the berries are shrunken and partially dried out from being in the refrigerator too long, you can add a lot more) Save a small handful of berries to sprinkle into any muffins that don't have enough (like when you're scraping the last of the batter off the sides of the bowl). Stir 10 strokes, or just enough to disperse the berries. Fill muffin cups about halfway full. Bake 20-25 minutes, or until they spring back when gently pressed in the center. *If you have neither buttermilk nor sour cream, mix 1 cup milk and 1 tbsp lemon juice, let stand 5 minutes before adding the oatmeal. Note: This is a great recipe for blueberries (or any other berries) that have gone squishy or otherwise passed their prime. If using frozen blueberries, let them wait in the freezer until you're ready to stir them into the batter.  Source: some mid-2000s refrigerator calendar

After the chocolate dot cookies drove me to flour-induced madness (even though they came out all right in the end), I wanted a recipe that would work exactly as written. Which brings us to today's recipe.

Way back in the day, my mom had one of those big calendars on the refrigerator to keep track of who had soccer practice and who had marching band on what days. It was interspersed with household management tips and recipes. I thought these blueberry muffins looked good enough to copy down the directions, but then I was just never in the mood for blueberry muffins. And after a while I forgot the piece of paper was tucked in the cover of one of my cookbooks. But this week, we had a lot of blueberries go soft and squishy on us. They were still perfectly good to eat, but no one wanted to.

This recipe demands a lot of bowls and a surprising amount of countertop acreage. You definitely want a dishwasher at hand. 

Getting down to ingredients, this recipe uses a lot of brown sugar. You can definitely tell this it comes from before "The Great Muffin Disillusionment:" that moment when we all collectively realized that stirring fruit into cake batter does not make it healthy.  

Meanwhile, ten minutes of soaking time had turned our oatmeal and sour cream into spackle. I'm not sure why we were supposed to soak them ten minutes, but I'm guessing the muffins don't bake long enough to soften the oats.  

And now, less than a minute after we finished getting everything into separate bowls, we started putting it all back together. At this point I noticed there's no butter, shortening, or oil in the recipe. Maybe the absence of fat makes these muffins instead of uniced cupcakes. At first I thought that just cutting the fat out of a cake recipe would ruin it. Then I thought that the war cake only has a couple of spoonfuls of shortening in it, and it is always delicious.

I ended up nearly doubling the berries because (as aforementioned) ours were squishy and sad. I know I might have ruined the recipe, but it beats freezing half-expired berries and then forgetting they're lodged behind last month's casserole. But as you can see, we didn't overload the batter with fruit. Maybe the original recipe writers were a little bit too parsimonious with their berry allowance.

The batter tasted really good. So even if these had a terrible texture after baking, at least the flavor would be right.

These were unexpectedly popular in the house. I kept seeing everyone go back to take just one more off the countertop. Within a few hours, the top of the trash can had a little pile of empty cupcake wrappers. I was asked to make them again the next day. "But we don't have any more expiring fruit!" I objected.

"We could... uh... make them with fresh fruit." Well to my nickel-counting self, that was heresy. But since no one else had near-dogmatic objections, I committed fresh berries to the oven. It may be extravagant, but what could I do but give in to popular demand?

As you already surmised, these were really good. They are surprisingly light and airy. They tasted a lot like granola bars-- the good ones that don't try to pretend they're good for you. You could argue that I put too many blueberries in them, but I think they were better this way. They kind of turned into mini cobblers, and also they tasted better because I had the happiness of knowing that I had avoided wasting fruit. 

And even if you buy fresh fruit just for these, they're too good to worry about it. 

Sachertorte: An unexpected revisit

Sometimes you get to find out how a recipe should have been done.

A while ago, I went out to visit a friend who had just finished a particularly nasty semester of grad school. To reward himself, he had ordered a sachertorte from the actual Hotel Sacher in Vienna. If you're willing to pay over $80 for a single cake, they will ship it to you in a cute wooden box. 

This cake came pre-cut into some really big slices. Like, those are some American-sized wedges of cake. I guess if you're paying $80 for a cake, a small sliver will not do.

 

Having made a sachertorte quite some time ago, I was really curious how my attempt compared to the real thing. And... well, the Hotel Sacher's tasted just like the one I made. I shouldn't be surprised. I got the recipe from a book called Austrian Cooking and Baking by Gretel Beer, an Austrian cookbook writer. She would have definitely known how one of Austria's most famous cakes should taste. 

And furthermore, this was easy to make, so I didn't really have a chance to mess it up. Granted, I flubbed the icing immediately thereafter. But the cake itself didn't have any finicky steps or other ways to accidentally ruin it.

The whipped cream hides the bad icing beautifully.

And so, if you want to have a genuine Austrian sachertorte, the recipe from Austrian Cooking and Baking is just as good as what you'd get if you ordered it from the home country. Gretel Beer's recipe is almost certainly not the one they use, but you won't taste the difference.

If you live in the US and really want a genuine imported Austrian cake in a stamped wooden box (or just don't feel like making one for yourself), you better order fast. The Austrian postal service (and over 80 other countries) has discontinued all parcel shipments to the US because a certain special someone keeps playing with tariffs, and who knows how long private couriers will continue putting up with this.